


Moments at Gol

by Sarek and Amanda Archive Maintainer (Selek)



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Aconitum-Napellus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 07:15:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selek/pseuds/Sarek%20and%20Amanda%20Archive%20Maintainer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amanda visits Spock after the fal-tor-pan.</p><p>Written by Aconitum-Napellus.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Amanda

Moments At Gol

Amanda.

It was Amanda's seventh visit to Spock at Gol. Each time so far she had found him sitting in that featureless room, his hands arranged before him as a focus, apparently trying to find something within himself. As she entered the room today he was sitting again in the same position, in the same chair, with his hands in a classic meditation position. He appeared to be staring intently at his fingertips, but his eyes were focussed far beyond them.

'Spock,' she said.

After a moment he looked at her.

'Yes, Mother,' he said in that steady, strange voice, evincing no surprise or joy or displeasure at her unexpected arrival.

She smiled tolerantly. Was he calling her mother because he knew her to be the woman who had bore him and nurtured him and cherished him through the most difficult years of his life, or because he had been told that she was his mother? Vulcans, it seemed, had an inbuilt love of correct processes, regardless of training or memory. Spock showed the same yearning desire to be *correct* now as he had as a two year old, when he had lined up objects in order with small, soft hands, and insisted on the correct bedtime procedure and always wanted his keev'la juice in the small blue cup.

He was looking at her still, with polite, confused enquiry in his eyes. How long would it be, she wondered, before he lost that air of always being confused? Her own mother had had that look in her final years, but it had grown worse, not better. Spock, at least, knew her a little better each time she visited, instead of slipping away by degrees.

'I wanted to see you, Spock,' she began. 'I should have let you know I was coming, but – '

'Is there something you wished to discuss?' he asked, staring unblinkingly at her face.

'No, Spock,' she said patiently. 'I wanted to see you because I'm your mother, and you're my son.'

'Ahh.'

'Spock, it's a beautiful, clear day outside,' she told him, gesturing to the door. 'Would you come for a walk with me?'

His forehead furrowed. 'The adepts do not advise it,' he said, turning his head back and lifting his hands into the meditation posture again.

'Damn the adepts!' she snapped, grasping his hand in hers, her long-learnt patience slipping for a moment. 'Your mother advises it.'

Spock looked first at his hand, held in her smaller, more aged fingers, as if he was very consciously connecting the sight of those hands with the sensations in his skin. If there was any mental connection in the touch she was unaware of it, but he looked up at her again with a new degree of recognition in his eyes. He let her hold on for a few more seconds, then very deliberately removed his hand from her grasp, and got to his feet.

'I am ready,' he said, gesturing towards the door.

She almost laughed at the absurdly self-evident statement. Almost all that Spock owned in this room was the white robe he wore. There was no finding of coats or searching for shoes as there would be on any normal, any human, expedition. His robe and his bare feet were all that he needed.

The transition from the shaded rock-hewn chambers to the brilliance of outside was as abrupt as it ever was on Vulcan. Even *Spock's* eyes took a few moments to adjust to the change in light. He gave the area a cursory glance, then turned his attention back to his mother.

'Where do you wish to go?' he asked.

'Oh – anywhere,' she shrugged.

Spock looked at her, but did not give voice to the perplexity that was evident on his face. So much of life perplexed him at the moment. He could not possibly question everything, particularly those odd vagaries of his human companions. He began to follow his mother's lead along one of the flat, well-worn paths of Gol.

She glanced up at him, and saw his flat acceptance slowly piquing into a general fascination. Spock undoubtedly held layers of information about his surroundings buried in his mind, ranging from personal experience, through cultural and religious history and a myriad varied branches of scientific knowledge. The longer they walked, the more she could see focus and intrigue crystallising in his eyes, and the more firmly she believed that she was correct to bring him outside, despite what the Vulcan adepts might say to her later.

'This place is familiar,' he said finally, scanning his eyes over the vast panorama of rock that was tinted in all shades of orange and brown. 'I – have lived here.'

She looked at him. He had chosen to push aside every scientific, detached observation that he could possibly make on the place, and raise the one subject that she had been praying for him to forget.

'You spent a long time here once, Spock,' she told him honestly, after a moment of deliberation.

Spock looked directly at her. 'I don't remember specifics,' he said.

'Well,' she said slowly.

She had never liked to talk about that time, even after Spock had renounced kolinahr. She had never felt so distant from her son even when he was travelling the farthest stars as she had when he had cloistered himself in Gol, giving a reason to no one for his choice.

He was staring at her still, with an intelligent perception that survived despite his memory loss.

'There is something you do not wish to say – about the time I spent at Gol,' he said.

'You – decided to take the kolinahr,' she said after a moment of hesitation, looking down at her own clasped hands. 'You never told me why. I – can't tell you anything about your time here, Spock. You never told me yourself.'

Spock blinked as an eddy of hot wind blew dust across his face, and then turned slowly, taking in the contours and strata of the rocks as if he was trying to coax memory from them.

'Kolinahr – is emptiness,' he said slowly. 'Perhaps I have achieved it now.'

She held tears back just a millimetre from the surface, and took his hand in hers. She stroked her thumb over the back of his hand, remembering how soft and trusting those hands had been once, clutching at hers as if she was the only thing between him and the unknown danger of the world.

'You – have not achieved emptiness, Spock,' she said with effort, looking up into his dark eyes. 'You are not empty. Everything that you were is there, in your mind. You're trying to find it this time, not to parcel it away like so much unwanted goods.'

He caught the bitterness that had edged into her voice, despite her effort to hide it.

'Mother,' he said, and she heard in his voice that tone that he had always used when her humanness had bewildered and distressed him. It was a wonderful thing to hear, and she smiled brilliantly through the starting tears.

'Spock, you are going to come back to me,' she said firmly, holding both of his hands in hers. 'Your father and I will help you find yourself.'

'That may take some considerable time,' Spock warned her seriously, looking down at her, still with that air of hesitancy in his face.

'I have that time,' she promised. 'I will always have that time.'


	2. Sarek

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarek visits Spock after the fal-tor-pan.

Sarek

 

He had stood in the doorway for some time before his son noticed his presence.

Spock was sitting near the window – in this case a roughly square hole hewn out of the rock – with his hands held together before his face in a perfect attitude of meditation. The dying light of 40 Eridani (for so it would be in his space-faring son's mind – not Nevasa, not the light-bringer) caught his face with a golden-red brilliance. The colour was streaked in a pure beam across his temple and cheek, highlighting the sparse contours of his face, highlighting the slight furrow between his brows that indicated that all was not calm in the mind beneath.

'Spock,' Sarek said flatly. No logic in such human devices as clearing the throat or shuffling the feet to announce his presence.

His son lowered his hands with the slowness of one remembering how to use his muscles. *Sakak* Sarek thought. Sakak, who fell into a thousand year sleep under the spell of an angry sorcerer, and when he awoke had to relearn the thousand muscles and ways of moving. Perhaps the tales from the old time were relevant after all…

The son turned his head towards the father, and the beam of light travelled over his face, and was lost, casting his features into deeper shadow. There was the smallest narrowing of the eyes, the smallest deepening of the furrow between his brows – and then he said in a steady, but somewhat questioning, voice, 'Sarek?'

'Yes, Spock,' he nodded, taking another step forward. 'Sarek.'

'He who is my father,' Spock continued, his voice still suggesting a question, his wording the formal wording of the priestesses who had restored his Katra to his body.

'I am your father,' Sarek nodded directly.

Spock continued to stare at him, unwavering, and a brief moment of light passed through his eyes, as if a spark of knowledge had finally found its home. Sarek found himself wondering precisely what revelation his son had experienced – but he pushed that aside swiftly. The interior of Spock's mind was his own again, for no one but him and the healers to question.

Spock held his eyes for a moment longer, then turned back to his hands, apparently examining the contours and creases of his fingers in their meditative position.

Sarek moved further into the room. He looked around, taking in the fact that there was only one chair, and sat on the bed, his back as erect as if he had been sitting on a posture stool. He regarded his son, unspeaking. Genesis had achieved a remarkable feat – apparently taking a speck of his son's DNA from his decaying body, creating it anew, and accelerating his growth until it almost paralleled his age at his time of death. Strange it would be if he had been left decades younger, or decades older… But he had not. There was no logic in pondering that possibility, except in scientific curiosity. Fortuitously his son's mind, when it was fully recovered, would have the precise sum of experience and knowledge that *should* reside in a body of that age.

He felt ill at ease. He had to admit that. He had taken a great part in his son's learning as a child. He had helped to form his young mind. It had been a great shock when Spock had decided to reject all that he had learnt in order to study at Starfleet – more so because so much of what he had learnt had been of Sarek's own teaching. And now Spock's relearning was emphatically in the hands of the healers of Gol. Yes, it was – disquieting.

He realised that Spock's eyes were still upon him, one eyebrow raised and his head slightly tilted in an attitude of query that reminded Sarek forcefully of his wife. Even Spock's lips were pursed in an imitation of Amanda in possession of a wordless question.

'Spock,' he said, to break the silence. 'It was suggested that a visit from a close relative would assist your recovery.'

That eyebrow moved upwards again – a minute amount, but it was perceptible to Sarek. A judgement. An unspoken judgement had passed through Spock's mind.

'Should old acquaintance be forgot…' Spock said, as if he had pulled the phrase blindly from a velvet bag.

'That is attributed to Robert Burns – a human poet,' Sarek informed him.

'Yes,' Spock nodded gravely, as if he was in the process of solving an age old puzzle. 'I am inclined to believe that old acquaintance should *not* be forgot.'

His eyes narrowed again.

'Father,' he said, then paused, as if tasting the word. 'I – am uncertain as to the parameters of our relationship. I feel – a certain regard for you. I believe mother would term it *fondness*. And yet – '

He trailed off, fixing those bird-of-prey eyes on his father again, missing nothing on the landscape of his face, but wholly blind to what might lie beneath the surface.

Sarek inhaled. No logic in prevarication.

'There was – a rift between us, Spock,' he said heavily. 'Such as should never occur between father and son.'

'And yet – I am told that you were the *primum movens* of the recovery of my body?' Spock said, puzzlement clear in his voice.

Sarek allowed just a hint of a smile to warm his face.

'Spock,' he said gently. 'You are my son. There is a vast difference between a disagreement, and a desire to leave your body on an alien planet and your soul drifting, uncherished, in the void.'

'Uncherished,' Spock repeated, as if he was tasting the word. Another degree of light seemed to pass through his eyes. 'A father will cherish the son,' he said, looking down again, studying his hands again.

Sarek's hint-of-a-smile grew by a tiny amount. Spock was quoting from the most ancient of Vulcan texts. Interesting what phrases chose to lodge in his fractured memory.

Spock's eyes flicked from his own hands, to those of his father, comparing them silently.

'A father will cherish the son,' Sarek repeated, nodding his head. He recovered a measure of control even as he felt it slipping further. He steadied his expression, and said, 'T'Khit, the First Book of Wisdom. Written before the time of Surak – before the acceptance of logic, Spock.'

Spock's eyes seemed to become veiled again, the lids lowering a little.

'Yes,' he said, as if he had gained another measure of understanding of his father.

This time Sarek knew precisely what had passed through his son's mind. He bit back a welling sense of regret, a tired longing, and drew his barriers a little higher. He stood, straightening his jacket with the smallest of movements, and inclining his head in a formal nod.

'Your meditation is vital, and I have disturbed it too long,' he said, keeping his tone level and void of feeling. 'I must take my leave.'

Spock lifted his eyes to him, and nodded. Then he turned his face back to the window, and the red-golden beam slanted across his features again, casting half of his face into apparent darkness in contrast with the light. He lifted his hands in a perfect posture of meditation – and Sarek stepped silently out of the room.


End file.
